tooth and nail, inch by inch
by irenelefay
Summary: Set after the movies. Richie has to go home and deal with his sexuality, his dead middle school crush who might or might not have been the love of his fucking life, and the fact that he'll never know what could have happened with him. And there's absolutely nothing he can do about that. Or: Richie deserves to go on.


**tooth and nail, inch by inch**

It all began, thinks Richie, the exact moment Bev knocked on his door at the Townhouse, rapping twice on the wood with the rings on her left hand, and then Richie said, "Come in." Then the door creaked and Bev came in. It's important, he thinks, because Bev had no particular reason to go to his room, in fact she might as well have walked straight into hers, and that conversation might never have happened, and the events with It would have unfolded the same way they have actually unfolded.

But still Bev walked into Richie's room that evening, after Richie got the chance to relive a sweet, forgotten part of his childhood in the form of a fucking Paul Bunyan statue of all things, which was now rubbing against all the wrong spots, against the surface of a still open wound, the same that's been hurting for almost thirty years now and Richie may not know why it hurts, but he knows more about the pain now, he guesses. She did walk in, and it mattered.

Bev let her whole weight fall on the bed by his side – she didn't weigh a lot – but still Richie jumped a bit on that terrible, terrible mattress. "Hey," Bev said. "Hey," Richie replied. She was all skinny jeans and smoke stained fingers and short red hair. Physically, out of all of them, she was the one who'd changed the least – she wasn't much taller now than she was then, and there was something less fundamentally different in her features than there was in Bill, in Mike, in Richie himself. She did look her age, though – perhaps she'd just looked older then, at least in their eyes: how cool she always appeared, always with a cigarette between her index and middle finger, a mysterious smile on her lips, and yet she, too, must have looked terrified when Pennywise came, and yet… and yet now Richie knows that back then she had been only a child, just like the rest of them.

Richie didn't have it in himself to conceive such a complex thought that evening, sitting on his bed, but even if he didn't know it, such was the impression that the old Beverly had had on him when he'd seen her at the Jade of the Orient, the reason why he felt so deeply for her now – that and her bruised wrists. She sat on the bed with legs dangling and awkward hands, as if she had no idea what to do with them.

"I fell in love, in high school," she began. "In Portland. She had long, shining black hair and the sweetest eyes."

Richie noticed that he was still looking at the floor, so he looked up, to the hotel room wall covered in old paper.

"We were together for two years, then she graduated and went to college in California. I was very happy with her."

She was staring straight ahead too, he noticed, once he felt comfortable enough to turn around. Richie had no idea what expression was on his face, but hers was absolutely blank. It looked like she was watching a nature documentary, or focusing really hard on something, but in front of her was only the door.

"Did the clown use that against you too?" he managed to ask.

Beverly shook her head.

"Because you have other issues, or…?"

"I don't know. It was a long time ago, and there's been mostly men ever since. But I'm… fine with it, sorta. Everyone important in my life knew."

"What do you mean?"

"Honey…" she got up from the bed and began pacing the tiny room, only a few steps before she had to turn around. "Just because It used it against you, it doesn't mean it's a bad thing."

Richie raised his head at that.

"Do you think Ben being fat was a bad thing? Or Bill feeling guilty after what happened to Georgie?" she asked.

"No," he conceded.

"Then there's nothing wrong with being who you are, either. And none of us would think any less of you because of it."

"No," he said, and he thought – his mind screamed at him – it's not the same thing, you can't know that, then why are you telling me this at eleven pm, in a dark hotel room?

"It never fed into our faults, only our fears."

It was dark outside now, Richie noticed. There were trees. He wondered what kind of trees they were. Anything not to think about what Bev was saying.

"So I should have just said to the world that I'm a fag, and the clown would've disappeared? Just like that?"

"I'm not suggesting a solution." Bev smiled. "We all know that's not how any of it works, Rich."

Then no one said anything and they all went home, and if their family or friends asked:

Officially a bad, bad man was walking the streets of Derry in 1989, killing all those kids, including Bill's brother, and it was someone they were close with, because he worked at the school. And now Stanley's killed himself and the perp's been caught and they all had to go back to Derry for the trial, which is where Eddie died in some freak accident, his heart couldn't take it. Oh, and it's not in the papers because of some obscure privacy reason.

And Richie is sure his agent doesn't really buy it, but at least Stan and Eddie's deaths are on those fucking papers so Todd has the decency to shut the fuck up.

Now it's been more than weeks but less than months, and Richie is lying on his bed in the dark blue sheets that haven't been pulled up or touched by fresh air in way too long, clothes scattered all over the floor of his bedroom in the LA house. Because he now lives in LA, just like he already did before Mike called him to return to Derry. He's a big boy who can afford to live in a reasonably nice house in LA, mostly because he doesn't have a single mouth to feed except for himself, not even a goldfish. The place is unsanitary and scarcely furnished and he almost never eats at the table, but it's his and there are no roaches because he's a really big boy now.

Maybe it's time to analyze why he's been so stubborn – so closeted, the youth says – anyway, why he's remained so secretive, so ashamed, about something that…

He works in a – what did his mother say – rather eccentric field where it should not be such a big deal. He lives in a big city where it's most definitely not a big deal. He sees men holding hands every tenth or eleventh time he goes out – he did the maths – and it makes his chest tighten and his stomach contract with nausea.

Maybe it is time to develop that cocaine addiction he's toyed with? He gets up, walks down the stairs and goes to the dark wooden kitchen that came with the house, where he reheats some old coffee that tastes like dirt. He checks his phone and there's a four digit number hovering over the icon with the envelope.

Pennywise knows – knew – how to hit all his soft spots. All of their soft spots.

How he knew that, no one can tell – he was a demonic creature from outer space, in the end. He really is – was – he remembered about him just a few weeks ago and now he's gone, and it must be hard to suddenly remember something so big, so visceral about yourself, and have to deal with its end in such a short amount of time.

He thinks about the things Bev said. Thing is, what Pennywise told them, they were all lies:

Ben might still feel like that chubby boy deep inside – apologizing for taking up too much space – moving awkwardly, in that formerly fat way – but he's not, never has been and never will be unlovable, he was never meant to die alone – if not with Beverly, then with somebody else: Ben always had, even eleven year old Richie knew that, a bright and beautiful soul.

Bill's not to blame if his brother died. That's a no brainer.

Beverly also isn't a punching bag. That's also a no brainer. And even if growing up in such an environment, with someone like that, can and often does lead people to seek out the only thing they ever knew, well, nobody's a punching bag, and especially not her. And in the end people can and do get out – refer to Ben's bright and beautiful soul for clarification.

But he – Richie – Trashmouth – well… faggot and fairy and God knows whatever else, they might not be nice words, but they do all mean the same thing, although there are nicer ways to say that and even Trashmouth will concede – but the substance doesn't change, that Richie, well, he just is all those things and – he's checked – Pennywise's departure hasn't changed that. And that's not that same pattern, you know.

It's just not.

And it's unfair – unfair that they get to get away and he does not; that they get to live happily ever after and he does not. That they get to break free from all the guilt, the abuse, the loneliness, and just live, the way forty year olds are meant to live, not chained to some obscure childhood memory, not fighting a never ending battle against themselves that can only end one way, and sooner than later at this rate. That they get to marry, and be happy, and Richie can't, because Eddie, he…

Because every year seems to go by faster than the one before and even his mother has stopped asking, and Richie knows he doesn't have much time left to acquire something even remotely resembling a normal life, like Bill and Audra and Bev and Ben have, with their dog and their boat. And what does Richie get?

He gets an indefinite amount of time he calls 'mourning', during which he just stares at the void more often than he did before, uninstalls the apps and sets some arbitrary rules about when he'll download them again – two to six months, the amount changes often, no more than six, anyway – because even his libido has died, together with his will to live and, well, with Eddie.

He even fears for his mind at some point, early on. One night he can't sleep – that happens often, this is just one particular night – so he puts on an outfit that vaguely reminds him of running gear: tight pants made of some weird stretchy fabric and a white, shapeless shirt – so that oncoming cars can see him in the dark, and spare him, maybe, that'd be nice. The sneakers don't look like running gears though, they have flat soles, he can feel the earth and the pavement, hard under his feet.

A little less than a mile away from the house there's a park where little children go to play, while their parents socialize, sitting on the benches, because parents need to socialize too, apparently; now he's walking to the playground slowly, trying not to make a single sound, maybe a little underdressed for the chilly weather because he's starting to get fucking cold. There's no one on the swings – there's always some kid on the swings during the day – so he makes himself smaller, which is hard, since he's somehow grown past six feet, sits down and starts dragging his legs in the mud to swing, back and forth, back and forth, just a little, not like he used to do as a child. He used to try to get as high as he could on the swings, with the furor that's never really left him, and then jump from the highest point he could reach. The final purpose was supposed to be a clean landing on his own two feet, and his poor old mother always screamed at him when he tried. If he tried to do it now, he'd probably break his neck. So now he's moving but just barely, and the change of scenery seems to work: he begins to think.

He thinks of Stanley, who used to be his best friend, once upon a time. How they got into countless little fights and their friendship only grew stronger every time. He thinks of the Losers and how nice it felt, for once, to feel part of something, and then he thinks about the fact that he's probably looking at that time in his life through rose tinted glasses, even though they were fighting an evil fucking clown, that he couldn't have been as happy as he remembers being, but it's all he has.

He thinks of the Losers now, chilly air caressing his face: Bill's a novelist and married to an actress, a pretty one; Ben's rich and famous doing something he's always loved doing; Bev has her own line of clothes; Mike might not have made it big like the others did, but now he gets to live Derry and live his life and that's way more than Richie can claim at the moment; Stanley married Patricia, who sounded like a really great woman, on the phone, and even in person, that one time they saw her in Atlanta. And then there's Eddie, who used to be a risk analyst.

Eddie.

Suddenly the swings remind him of being thirteen years old with Eddie, and he wonders why he didn't make that connection sooner. Eddie married a woman ten times his body weight who looks a lot like his mother, and Freud would have had a field day with him. But he got married, which is, again, more than Richie will ever be able to claim, because –

Because suddenly it feels so right, so obvious, that they all grew up to become attractive, successful people, except for Richie. It's the most natural thing in the world, actually, and he should have seen this one coming. Richie wouldn't say that he feels like he's broken, because even at three am sitting on the swings in a children's playground he doesn't feel that dramatic. But he'd go as far as saying that there's always been something off about him, just beyond the surface, and it's never been the Voices or his inability to keep his mouth shut. Those were just a decoy. Surprisingly enough, it's not the gay thing either. It's deeper, more fundamental than that. Fundamental, he thinks, that's the word, there's something fundamentally off with him and he does't know what it is, or how to fix it, because he's never been anyone else other than Richie fucking Tozier, his whole life.

Therefore it's no wonder that Ben got the girl in the end, his Beverly, the love of his life, while Richie saw Eddie… he held Eddie as he…

One morning – it's spring – he's still in mourning, closer to the beginning than to the end of it – he gets up, still in those same, unwashed blue sheets, and something in the air hits him differently, maybe the early spring. His body doesn't feel as disgusting as it usually feels after sleeping naked against the filthy fabric, he no longer feels like he wants to escape from his own skin, so he drags himself to the too large bathroom where every surface is so white that every particle of dirt seems to want to be noticed, the bathroom where he's puked more times than he can count. He lets his boxers fall to his ankles, steps out of them and then walks into the luxury shower that has like four functions, although he's only ever tried maybe two of them, and once it was by accident.

He lets the water run over him like for a while, pretending he's a statue in one of those ancient fountains, until it starts to feel like wallowing in self pity, at which point he turns the water off and gets dressed quickly, dripping water all over the carpeted floor. He picks a clean suit from the farthest corner of his wardrobe and rummages in vain for three good minutes, looking for socks. He doesn't find a clean pair. Then he runs to the garage, climbs into his car that he hasn't touched in two weeks, and starts driving, turns his mind completely off, lets muscle memory alone do all the work. By the end of the short walk from the parking lot to the building where his manager works, his feet are already bleeding, so he remembers, ah, no clean socks.

His agent almost slaps him in the face when he has the guts to actually open the door and go inside. "Old friend!" he shouts. But he knows, after Todd starts screaming at him, that he's going to do dates again soon, and everything's going to be mostly fine, because Todd is really good at damage control and Richie hasn't even done anything too terrible, apart from disappearing for more than three months (and being absolutely intolerable for the following year, but Todd can't know this yet).

"They caught a guy who wreaked havoc among kids in my hometown of Buttfuck Derry, Maine," he says, after Todd is done with insults. "We had to go back because Justice needed us. As witnesses."

Todd is staring at him now, mouth ajar, a look that does't suit him, it makes him look dumb, although Todd, Richie thinks, is a very smart man, hell, he managed to turn Richie fucking Tozier into a famous guy.

"Unfortunately it's brought back some, eh, memories among us former kids. My best bud from middle school killed himself," Todd's mouth closes, "and another guy died from illness while we were there," he says, feeling a bit like a surgeon who's busy removing a stubborn tumor, because the words don't seem to want to get out. Realizing in horror that 'another guy' really means Eddie Kaspbrack, the first love of his fucking life, and at this rate the last.

Todd has his face buried in his open hands.

"Two others remembered they were in love with each other and they're getting fucking married!" Richie tries.

From the way Todd is looking at him during that ridiculous, ridiculous meeting, he must be convinced, Richie thinks, that one of his most successful comedians has met a turning point in his life – at some point Richie is holding back tears, for fuck's sake.

He's sure of it when Todd, for once, nods and doesn't even reply when Richie, desperate for words to say, half jokingly mentions his mom. Then Richie sighs, rubs his face and starts adding details to the story they all agreed upon, the surviving Losers, that is, the story with the bad man they've made up and George's and Stan's and Eddie's death that are way too real. Todd nods again. He asks him if they were close, and Richie replies – truthfully – that he barely even remembers Georgie, but Stanley was his best friend. He leaves out Eddie.

"I've thought about it, Todd, my sunshine, and I…" Richie's throat is suddenly dry. It's like being a surgeon again, because it doesn't want to come out, like, physically, but at the same time he's almost ecstatic thinking about what he's going to say, he has, no joke, butterflies in his stomach, "I don't want to tell girlfriend jokes anymore. I mean, dude, you know I've never had one, you must have some hypotheses about why."

Todd holds his gaze for a second, then he drops it and nods, without anger, or any resentment. Richie thinks he can see hints of sadness in Todd's smile, and his stomach sinks with the realization that he must have suspected it.

Then, trying really hard to say it like it's some unimportant thing, like a new haircut or a coffee stain on Todd's shirt, he tells his agent that he's going to start writing his own material.

He goes home, takes off the uncomfortable clothes and sits in front of his laptop, open on an empty Words document. He thinks about the fact that he's come out of the closet, to someone who actually exists, for the first time in his life, and it feels like it never happened, like a non-event. He thinks that he misses the first days of primary school, when he was still able to realize things, to feel enthusiasm or fear or anything. No, not fear, scrap that, he's had enough of that. Enough with fear. He focuses on the empty page again.

He's written some stuff in the past, before he got famous enough to have a writer, he was decent at improv but he still wrote stuff down sometimes, and he thinks it must be muscle memory at first, when his fingers start typing.

He realizes halfway through the second sentence that he could have asked Bill for advice for this, that his friend's a famous writer and he hasn't even thought about taking advantage of this little fact, but he feels like it's something he should do himself. The first draft isn't perfect and neither is the second, or the third, but they're not too bad either and he can almost see his learning curve, so he thinks that maybe not everything has to be extremely difficult, for once in his fucking life.

Once the eleven months of mourning are over he redownloads the app and has an embarrassing encounter with a younger man who's really handsome but Richie's head's not really in it right now. Earlier, at the bar, he felt lighter, less afraid that someone was going to snap a picture of that famous comedian and post it on Twitter, which ends up not happening anyway. During the act, he thinks about his first time, with the guy named Chris, in college, before dropping out, Chris who was so sweet and liked to take care of him and spoil him and buy him coffee in the morning and laughed at all his jokes and all that could have been but never was because Richie was so ashamed, and all the good years he's robbed himself of –

And then he throws up because he's having nostalgic thoughts and they're not about Eddie.

"I'm gay," he finally tells the other Losers when they meet up in Atlanta to see Stanley's grave, even if everyone's a long and expensive plane ride away, "I never fucked anyone's mom, I confess."

Ben and Mike are standing in front of him and he and Bev and Bill are sitting on a bench in the grey and windy street just outside the Jewish cemetery, where they just spent the better part of an hour standing around the grave, eyes alternating between the tiny rocks and the picture of a man who looks a lot like the kid they knew, but older, and it hurts that they'll never know how he grew up, in which ways his character stretched throughout the years.

And fuck, this should be about Stanley and he's making it all about him – best case scenario, no one will care, worst case scenario they'll have a huge fight and they'll beat him and they'll desacrate the Jewish cemetery full of graves with little stones on top instead of flowers, which looks very smart to Richie, because at least stones don't become ugly after one week.

He's heard them say 'that's gay' to express disapproval enough time as kids, and okay, whatever, Richie said that too even if he now feels a bit guilty about that, but he's seen them laugh when he asked Eddie if he was married to a woman at the Jade of the Orient, and suppress laughter when the young man with the pink shirt spoke a bit too loudly, even though none of them had said anything about the poor Adrian Mellon, and they'd all agreed that it had been an incredibly inhumane act –

Wait, being beaten is no longer the worst case scenario –

(He could have been Adrian Mellon.)

(No, he's never been as brave as him.)

Ben steps forward and touches his shoulder with a feather light touch, which means he's not going to beat him up, or maybe this is just warm up, Richie thinks, now he kind of hates how shredded Ben has become. Mike does the same, hand firmly on his other shoulder, as Bill touches his wrist, and Bev wraps an arm around his back, and they're all closing around him, making him feel like the yolk of an egg, or like the pearl in an ostrich, or like that one time in the quarry, after they jumped, he can't tell, and then Ben and Mike crouch down awkwardly and it feels like a hug.

"Thank you for telling us, honey," Beverly speaks first, as she usually does, she's the PR of the Losers, she's so fucking sweet to Richie even if he doesn't deserve it. She's thcuking a strand of hair behind her ear, showing off the ring Ben's bought her, which is white gold, thin and expensive looking. Richie briefly wonders whether Ben knows about it – about the Portland girl with the shiny black hair and the sweetest eyes. He supposes he'll never ask.

"Richie," Bill says, "you know we don't mind, right? We'd never be mad at you for something like this."

"Who do you think we are, Richie?" Ben says. Mike doesn't say anything and Richie only needs to take a look at his eyes to know that he knows.

"You loved him," Bev whispers, putting that look in Mike's eyes into words, and it hurts, hurts even more than the first confession did, when Richie just nods and closes his eyes. The hug tightens, and Richie thinks of another hug, in the water, and it's suddenly obvious that they had to know all along.

"I hope I'm not accidentally insulting him by saying this," he says, and his voice breaks on 'saying' – he got so close! Here it is, put into words, that feeling again – that he's something disgraceful, shameful, and all adjectives bad, and that he's tainting, dirtying Eddie's memory with his horrifying, shameful unrequited love, and –

"I hope Myra won't take it too bad," he says, even if he knows he shouldn't joke – because it's a joke and Myra must never know – but Bev wraps both arms around him and hushes him and says, "Never."

"You're not dirty, Richie," Mike says, because he's the one who's had the most time to process the ways Derry has fucked them up, and this part seems like a big deal.

"What the fuck is wrong with me, then," he says then, more like mutters, as everyone breaks the embrace and Ben and Mike go back to standing. Nobody hears him, or if they do they must think that it's a joke, because the risk, when you tell too many jokes, is that people won't take you seriously anymore.

"I'm so, so sorry I told my agent first, you guys," Richie says, and wonder why he did that and why it felt so much easier. Probably because at the end of the day he doesn't give a shit about Todd, not really.

"I'm so proud of you," Bev whispers in his ear. Richie inhales and thinks, this should be the other way around, because Bev has always been so much cooler than him.

"I loved him," he says that night, to Bev, against sitting on his bed in one of the fanciest hotels in Atlanta. "So, of fucking course he had to fucking die. That's just my luck," he says.

"It's not like anything could have come from that, anyway. He was married to a woman, for fuck's sake," he adds.

Beverly inhales deeply, raises a hand slowly, as if it's an extremely energy consuming task, and drops it heavily on Richie's arm.

"Sometimes I think he only died because I fell for him when I was fucking thirteen, Bev. Because of fucking course it had to happen to me."

Bev doesn't say things like, 'This makes no fucking sense,' or, 'Why are you making Eddie's death all about you,' and Richie is very grateful.

During the first show, Richie remembers all the lines he's written, and walks out feeling a bit better than he used to feel after telling whatever his old writer crafted for him. To be more specific, he's thinking about the joke with the girlfriend and the friend's Facebook page – the girlfriend he doesn't have, never has had, and never will have – he might have made out with a couple of girls in college, but he's never seen the point of breasts, or openly lying – as if lying by omission is not lying as well.

Now, of course the clown thing is off limits, and he's not going to write comedy about his own childhood trauma anyway, just like he's not going to psychoanalyze himself or anything. He's tried to just, like, write circles around the thing, at first: jokes about other people's girlfriends, which is a subtle change, to be fair, at the very most mom jokes. (He can finally make those again, although they hurt, they hurt, they hurt. Just a bit, he can still say them out loud without breaking down. But the pain is there.)

Although Todd knows, it's an unspoken agreement between them that he is not to touch the gay thing. Except at some point, it feels like he's running out of space, that every single line he writes just wants to go there, like, desperately wants, although he knows that he can't go there yet. He never knew just how important sex and dating are to an average adult man, until he has to stop joking about it, of course. It's this huge, unavoidable rock in the middle of the street, and there's no way around it. He knows the wall has been torn down when he finds himself thinking, why can't I go there, exactly. Give me one good reason, agent.

So during the next show he mentions Chris, his ex from college, and makes a joke about the way he meticulously made his bed, like Monica from Friends, and then stashed weed directly underneath it. The people seem taken aback and someone gasps, but then they clap their hands with more vigour than usual, and someone in the front row is smiling so fucking wide. Afterwards Todd sends him an enigmatic text that reads, 'wasn't expecting anything less'. Whether it's anger, pride, or annoyance, Richie can't tell. People have clapped, and he's not disgraced.

(The people who clapped their hands at him get to go home with their wives and husbands and maybe fuck or drink some chamomile together and kiss the kids goodnight and spoon in bed and what does he, Richie, get to keep, at the end of the day?)

He builds this whole persona, the former small town gay kid, now based in LA and a somewhat famous comedian, even though nobody knew that he was the small town gay kid back then, which feels a bit dishonest, he hasn't truly lived the experience, has he? It might be wrong and it might make people hate him – stop going to his shows – explicitly call him a fag in the YouTube comment section. But it was, Richie knows it now, the only viable option, to feel more like a person again. Maybe being true to himself is a selfish act, after all.

(It's not so simple, though.

To be the small town fag is one thing; there needs to be one, that's just the hand he was dealt at life.

But no one wants to be the love of the small town fag's life, you know, the fucking voice says.)

At Bev and Ben's – weirdly alliterative – wedding he gets assigned to a table with the other Losers and Bill's wife Audra who's an actress and this guy named Matt whom nobody else seems to know, Ben's architect friend from college whom Ben goes out of his way to introduce to Richie. Matt is tall and older than them, with salt and pepper hair and light blue eyes, Scandinavian features and slender hands. And, Ben had said, ecstatic, Matt was based in LA!

He has that way of talking, moving, that would make him the target of even more bullies than usual back in Derry, and he's wearing a lavender tie, but none of that seems to bother him as he talks about Bill's books with their author and about the history of the US library system with Mike and God, how few of the original Losers are left. He mentions having an ex boyfriend within the first ten minutes of sitting at the table. That's fucking sexy in the eyes of a man who's spent his whole life trying to annihilate himself, Richie realizes. And he does it naturally, although Richie has a feeling that he, too, knows that this apparently random seating arrangement has been tampered with, somehow.

Matt seems to know everything and he seems to know how to be liked, by everyone, straight away, but it doesn't feel fake, because he takes his time to get to know each of them, one by one, and there's something personal about the way he talks to each of them, and…

And Richie, as a child, developed his questionable sense of humour because of exactly this type of situation – as a wall – a fucking barrier between himself and the outside world, and the people who are pretending to care, but they can't know, they wouldn't understand –

"Ben told me you do stand up, Richie," Matt says, and Richie is now sure that he's going to make an absolute fool of himself in front of everyone.

Then Ben and Bev walk into the room and everyone cheers.

Ben's suit is blue and perfectly tailored, and he looks like an actor, they both look like they're the only person the photographer focused on in a group picture, and everyone else is dimmer, blurrier. Bev is dressed in a lighter blue, maybe because she already used white, Richie thinks. She didn't design the dress. It's long and made of some kind of see through material, in some parts, Richie doesn't know a thing about women's fashion. He can tell she's very beautiful. He doesn't find women ugly – not especially – he used to think they were an acquired taste, too sophisticated for Richie's simple palate. He used to think it was natural to notice men's beauty first, because it's more immediate than women's. Now he knows it's a convoluted pile of bullshit that his brain has erected throughout the years, and that it's taking him just as long, if not longer, to unlearn all of this. He also knows that he could probably make a very good joke out of that, someday.

Bev and Ben kiss and the crowd cheers. The waiters start serving the food and it's the fanciest stuff Richie's eaten in years.

And if he and Matt talk too much, during the reception, and even have a little dance, not one of the serious ones, while everyone's already fooling around, they're not met with stares or laughter or disgusted faces – everyone is either drunk, or minding their own business, or smiling. Everyone's having fun and they don't look like there's something fundamentally off with them, and Richie is finally having fun too.

Richie leaves with Matt's number safe on his phone's contacts list, and a date already planned for the following week in LA.

Turns out that Matt, too, has seen the love of his life die, not in his arms but through a hospital wall, because his parents flew in at the very last minute and decided that Matt had turned Tony gay with some kind of magic not otherwise specified. They had power of attorney and the power to exclude him from the hospital room where he'd spent the last few months of his life, because without any kind of legal partnership, Matt was no one to Tony.

Tony loved him – for sure – no question about it, and they had fifteen good years together, like together together. Matt's almost fifty now. He tells Richie that he's positive that it's not too late for him, he's only forty-two.

And Richie was scared at first, with a fear he couldn't even translate into words, that with Eddie gone, his only chance at love is gone, too. But now he knows deep in his heart that Matt's soul is just too beautiful to be a second choice.

"I feel like I shouldn't be feeling like this," Richie tells him one night, after many, many dates, obviously not on the first, even if Matt told him about Tony at the very first bar. He told him almost everything, the diagnosis and everything, in front of a cappuccino and black coffee for Richie, even though he didn't disclose all the details.

Now they're on Matt's light grey sofa, watching commercials between two parts of a sappy romantic comedy and something about the way a supporting character wears a fanny pack is bugging Richie.

"There's no 'should' in grieving, Richie," Matt says, with his wise old man voice. He runs a hand through his curly hair and Richie leans down into his touch.

"But it's not like we were in a relationship or anything," Richie says. "We were close in, like, middle school and he was my first crush and I made a lot of jokes about wanting to fuck his mom because I was trying to hide it, then there was the thing with the dead kids in my hometown, then we disappeared from each other's lives for more than twenty fucking years, and then I see him for less than a week, and he dies. I'm not his wife, Matt, I have no right…"

"It doesn't matter," Matt says. "You've been through something very traumatic together, Richie."

And of course Matt doesn't know about the clown, and conceivably never will because Richie doesn't want to be involuntarily committed, thank you very much. And Richie's never, ever been able to keep a secret in his life, with one huge, awkward exception, and now he doesn't even have that anymore – he mentioned gay sex in a Netflix special! – and every time he has to lie about Derry he feels like he's drowning, because Matt doesn't deserve it.

"All of us have been through that," he says instead. "But why Eddie, in particular?"

"Because you loved him," Matt says, and Richie's throat starts to close.

"He would have been disgusted if he had known, anyway," he manages to spit out without his voice breaking.

Matt sighs deeply, then wraps an arm around Richie's shoulder, and Richie tries to relax into the warm and steady body next to him, so unlike his own.

"Richie," Matt says, and it's not the tone of a father who's about to scold his child, no – there's something else, softer, that's maybe pity.

"No, forget about it," he tries to say.

"Maybe he would have loved you back," Matt says, and Richie can feel the nausea approaching, the sappy words of a romantic comedy narrator voice – what romantic comedy were they even watching, Matt must have turned off the tv. Richie's trying to look away.

"Or maybe he wouldn't have," Matt says, and Richie has to close his eyes to be sure he's heard right, because no one has ever said this before.

"Maybe he would have been an asshole and he would have reacted badly. Called you names and never texted you again. I don't think he would have, because he sounds like he was a good guy, but he might have, if he'd lived long enough. But," Matt says, and looks at Richie in the eyes in a way that makes him feel like he's recently died and he's under the scrutiny of God himself and there's no point in hiding anything, "but, I don't think it's something you should spend your life believing," he says.

Richie closes his eyes and leans back into Matt, and they stay like this, just hugging, still as statues while something in Richie's chest lifts and something else expands, but it's not a bad thing because it's becoming a bit easier to breathe.

The next day Richie buys a toothbrush and leaves it in Matt's bathroom. Matt can't stop smiling.

The toothbrush turns into a shelf, which turns into a drawer, which turns into a section of the goddamn wardrobe in the end, he doesn't own a lot of clothes. One day they go to Ikea to buy a bedside cabinet together and Richie feels like he's just won the last level of a fucking videogame.

It might not be what he could have had with Eddie, and they might not be broken in exactly the same places, but now Richie actually likes to lie awake at night, at three, four AM, maybe (Matt's such a good sleeper, God bless him). Sometimes he turns around to look at Matt's sleeping face and thinks about this great little life he's conquered, inch by inch, fighting tooth and nail. He looks at Matt and thinks that he gets it, as much as anyone could, anyway, that everyone is broken in their own places and it's not a contest and that's OK.


End file.
